Does REST (RestTemplate) in Spring Library support HTTPS protocol?

Question

I'm trying to connect to a web server via HTTPS, but response.getBody() returns null however I want to return a JSON array. The statusCode is 200 and the headers contain the correct information, but the response body is null. I'm using the standard Spring RestTemplate API for this purpose specifically postForEntity(). Maybe in order to do this I have to use some special Spring API?

Unfortunately I couldn't find any information about HTTPS support and SSL/'TLS' certificates in the Spring REST documentation (it is quite limited).

Answer 1

You can configure the RestTemplate with the HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory, for example:

<bean id="httpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory" class="org.springframework.http.client.HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory"/>

<bean id="restTemplate" class="org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate">
    <constructor-arg ref="httpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory"/>
</bean>

That allows the RestTemplate to use the Apache HttpComponents HttpClient under the hood, which definitely supports SSL.

It looks like the HttpClient provided by HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory supports SSL out of the box, so there may be almost no configuration required on your side.